Augmented Reality Gaming in Sustainable Design Education
Publication: Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 1
Abstract
It is important for students in academic disciplines related to building design and construction to gain an understanding of the different sustainable design considerations that will affect a building’s performance. Additionally, it is important for these students to be able to generate, visualize, and assess the performance of alternative design options to determine the best possible approach. The research presented in this paper tasked students with performing a building redesign activity in which they had to design, visualize, and assess exterior wall designs to retrofit an existing facility and improve its sustainable performance. It was of interest to understand how augmented reality and simulation game technologies would influence students’ design processes during the activity. To measure student performance, 34 architectural engineering students, 47 architecture students, and 27 civil engineering students were given the same design activity using an augmented reality–based educational game called ecoCampus. The results of their work were compared with those of 65 students who completed a similar design activity using only blank sheets of paper and of another group of 23 students who used a paper-based approximation of the computerized ecoCampus. The findings indicate that students in all disciplines who used ecoCampus were able to break the tendency toward design fixation. These students were also able to use the application to assess their designs and generate additional concepts with better overall performance across all disciplines compared with the students who used paper-based formats. Although these observed behaviors were beneficial, the students who used ecoCampus also demonstrated a tendency to experiment with the application and occasionally create unrealistic, novelty designs to try to break the game. The findings from this work will help inform future efforts to leverage augmented reality and simulation game technologies for other use cases to allow users to assess what-if design scenarios in which they might otherwise be prone to design fixation.
Introduction
To make the best possible building design and construction decisions for a particular project, it is necessary for project team members to have an understanding of how the decisions that they make for their respective disciplines may affect other related disciplines. Without consideration of related disciplines, designers may attempt to maximize the performance of individual building systems or processes in isolation, which may not yield the best possible outcome for the whole building project. In an attempt to prepare students in the building design and construction disciplines for careers in this type of integrated work environment, this paper presents the findings from research conducted over multiple semesters to determine the benefits that augmented reality and simulation games can offer for building design education.
The educational game examined in this work employed a mobile computing system that allowed users to create several design concepts to determine how to best address a building design challenge. The application developed, called ecoCampus, uses an augmented reality–based simulation game interface to allow users to visualize possible building design retrofit solutions in the context of an existing space and also assess their design concepts to attempt to create the best possible building design solution (Ayer et al. 2014a). In this prior work, 47 students were tasked with creating a new exterior wall design for an existing building to attempt to make it perform more sustainably while also considering other performance factors, such as cost and constructability. The students used ecoCampus to develop, visualize, and assess their designs during the course of a 50-min class session.
To determine the benefits of this type of educational approach, the same design task was also given to students in prior semesters in which they were not provided with ecoCampus or a mobile computing system to assist in their design work. In one of these prior sessions, students were not given any suggestion of how to craft their design decisions, and instead, the 65 participants were given only blank sheets of paper and the design challenge description (Ayer et al. 2014b). An example design generated from this type implementation is shown in Fig. 1(a). In a separate implementation, 23 students were given a paper-based approximation of the ecoCampus application with similar information provided and printed images of the existing building with the exterior wall removed on which they could illustrate their designs (Ayer et al. 2013a). An example of a design generated from this design format is shown in Fig. 1(b).
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The assessment of these prior implementations explored how students in the architectural engineering (AE) curriculum approached the process of designing for sustainability with and without the influence of a computer-based application. In all design activity formats, students were allowed to self-direct their work, which provided them with the freedom to determine how they would approach the design challenge. In addition to observing the design process that students chose to employ in a self-directed context, this research also sought to understand the levels of engagement with the learning content through the different design formats. Engagement was measured through both self-reported levels of interest that students generated from the activity and also through analysis of the design process that the students used while completing the activity. This research extended the prior works by comparing the previous findings to how students used a slightly modified, second version of ecoCampus. This second version of ecoCampus was used by an additional 34 AE students. Additionally, this work also explored how students in other related disciplines, including 27 civil engineering (CE) and 47 architecture (ARCH) students, used this second version of ecoCampus to design.
Background
Traditionally, education has relied primarily on lecture-based teaching approaches to educate students about course content (Felder et al. 2000; Rugarcia et al. 2000). Recently, accreditation and supervising institutions, including ABET, have recommended a shift in educational approaches (ASCE 2008; Felder et al. 2000; Lattuca et al. 2006; Rugarcia et al. 2000). This shift in educational approaches has been recommended partly because of a changing curriculum of necessary content understanding, but also because of the recognition of the benefit of alternative educational methods. In the context of this work, instead of presenting sustainable design principles in a lecture-based format, inexperienced undergraduate students were tasked with actually creating a design based on sustainable design principles. This enabled the students to learn through doing as opposed to strictly learning through listening.
For certain learning tasks, new technologies can offer benefits for learning course content. One of the targeted learning tasks that this research explored was design visualization. In many different disciplines, complex three-dimensional (3D) object designs are typically communicated through two-dimensional (2D) plans and drawings, but building 3D mental models from 2D plans can be challenging for students and prone to errors (Johnson 1997). Augmented reality blurs the line between reality and the virtual environment by incorporating computer-generated virtual content with a user’s view of a real physical space (Milgram and Kishino 1994). This technology can help users view, navigate, and understand a virtual model more intuitively than other more traditional methods of communication (Azuma 1997; Furmanski et al. 2002; Shin et al. 2005).
In addition to the visualization benefits that can be afforded through augmented reality, there are also benefits that new technologies can offer students related to motivation to learn content. People may be motivated by different means. The typical academic motivation approach of linking class performance to course grade offers a primarily extrinsic means of motivation, where students are motivated to perform a task by the desire for high semester marks. This research explored how a simulation game could provide a more intrinsically motivational means for engagement, where students would be motivated to perform a task well not because of a desired grade, but because they desired to excel at the particular task. Simulation games are contests in which users move toward a certain goal under constraints that sufficiently model real-world conditions (Gredler 1994; Jacobs and Dempsey 1993). For the context of this work, it was of interest to understand how a simulation game could influence student engagement by examining both student perceptions, including levels of self-reported interest and enjoyment generated from the activity, and student behaviors exhibited during the design activity. In addition to using a simulation game to help users learn relevant content, it was also of interest to explore if it could help students resist the tendency toward design fixation. Design fixation is defined as adhering to a set of arbitrary rules or constraints that effectively limit creativity (Jansson and Smith 1991). Therefore, it was of interest to analyze how a simulation game could help break this tendency compared to paper-based methods in a self-directed environment.
Both augmented reality and simulation game technologies help bring content into context. Augmented reality helps students visualize virtual information (including geometric information) in the context of its physical space, and simulation games can help present learning content in the context of an applied scenario. Situated learning theory states that the best way to learn content that will eventually be applied in a given context is to learn that content in the context (Lave and Wenger 1991). For students embarking on a career in building design, this concept of learning content in context is especially relevant. This research examined how an augmented reality–based simulation game can help provide a learning experience in which students demonstrate and report beneficial learning behaviors and perceptions.
Methodology
This work built on prior research that tasked students with completing the same design activity using different formats for conceptualizing and illustrating their design concepts (Ayer et al. 2013a, b,2014b). In the prior studies, the design activity was offered only to students enrolled in a first-year AE seminar. This research not only examined how first-year AE students tended to perform the sustainable redesign activity, but also how students in a third-year CE course and a fourth-year ARCH course approached it. Although the students who completed the activity were in different academic years of study, the courses in which they were enrolled were generally the first in their curriculum that formally incorporated sustainable engineering content.
For all formats of the design activity, students were tasked with redesigning an existing exterior curtain wall on the Stuckeman Family Building located on the Pennsylvania State University’s campus in University Park, Pennsylvania. Their challenge was to define a new exterior wall concept that they felt would address sustainability better than the current design while still keeping in mind other performance factors, such as cost, constructability, and aesthetics. This particular building was chosen as an appropriate facility on which to base this exercise because, although the students had not had substantial sustainability education in prior courses, many had opportunities to familiarize themselves with the chosen building through building tours to discuss characteristics that supported its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification and their general familiarity with the building owing to taking courses within the building. These prior experiences provided students with a basic familiarity with the current building design before they developed their own concepts.
Students who completed a version of the building design challenge were allowed to self-direct their experience during the activity, which meant that students would not be instructed on how to complete their design process. Instead, they would be told what the design goals were and could subsequently determine a process for approaching design on their own. This helped in understanding students’ motivation and design behaviors in the context of the design challenge. The self-directed nature of this work also allowed students to define their own process for creating a design solution for the building project and to determine for themselves when they felt that they had arrived at their final design concept. Several different assessment activities were completed by the students to provide data throughout the design activity. The assessment activities were developed based on the assessments created in prior educational simulation game research for engineering education research (Nikolic et al. 2009). The content in these assessments and the time allotted to complete the design activity remained constant for all students regardless of the activity format, which allowed for direct comparison of results and identification of the types of behaviors that were observable within the same amount of time.
Pretests
Prior to completing the exterior wall redesign activity, students were given pretests to determine baseline knowledge of sustainable building concepts. Students were asked questions to elicit responses about their level of motivation, confidence in their abilities to complete this type of design activity, and basic demographic information. Finally, these pretests collected students’ responses about their level of familiarity with mobile computing devices, video games, and mixed reality. The pretests used experimental identification numbers to identify and track responses. The corresponding student names linked to the numbers were not known by the course instructor during the semester to encourage candid responses. These pretests were administered online and on paper in different experimental implementations. In all cases, the questions asked remained consistent between implementations.
Design Activity
After students completed the pretests, they were given a 5-min explanation of the design activity. All groups of students were told that they were required to design a new exterior wall for the Stuckeman Family Building, but should also consider other important performance factors in their design, such as cost, constructability, and aesthetics. For the students who completed the design activity with ecoCampus, they were also given a brief explanation of how to use the application. Fig. 2 shows the basic workflow of ecoCampus. There are three main user interfaces in ecoCampus with which a user interacts: the first screen [Fig. 2(a)] allows a user to define a new wall design in a touch-based interface with materials from the choices provided; the next screen [Fig. 2(b)] allows a user to hold up a mobile computing device to view a printed fiducial marker hung on the existing wall to view a virtual full-scale mockup of the design concept through augmented reality; and the last screen [Fig. 2(c)] allows a user to receive performance feedback about the design so that the benefits and drawbacks of the design concept may be assessed. After reviewing the summary screen, students were given the opportunity to repeat the design steps in ecoCampus if they felt that they wanted to improve on their design performance or explore alternative design options before stopping their work.
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Students were given approximately 40 min to complete the design activity. Regardless of which activity format they completed, all students were required to submit at least one design concept that they felt would address the sustainability needs of the building. Students were told that they were welcome to create as many design ideas as they felt were necessary within the class time, but had to create at least one design concept as a minimum requirement. For students completing paper-based versions of this activity, they were also offered unlimited additional sheets of paper on which to brainstorm other possible design concepts.
Posttests
At the end of the design session, students were asked to stop their design work and complete posttests. These posttest assessments were similar to the pretests in several topic areas. Similar questions were asked related to sustainable design and LEED content understanding. Additionally, questions were also asked about the students’ opinions and perceptions of the experience. Like the pretests, the responses to these assessments used experimental identification numbers to anonymize responses and encourage students to provide honest feedback about the activity. The posttests were administered online and on paper in different implementations. In all cases, the questions asked remained consistent between implementations.
Several posttest questions were asked that were of particular interest to this research. One question asked students about the level of enjoyment that they experienced while completing the design activity. This 5-point Likert-scale question ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree and asked students to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the statement “I enjoyed completing this activity.” Other 5-point Likert-scale questions asked students to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the following statements: “I am more interested in sustainability after completing this activity,” and “I am more interested in the building design process from this activity.” Finally, a 3-point question was asked related to students’ perceptions about the amount of time allocated to the activity. The choices for this question included not enough time, just enough time, and more than enough time.
Focus Groups
After the students had completed the design activity and assessments, they were contacted later in the semester and offered a chance to participate in focus-group sessions to discuss the design experience. These focus-group sessions were approximately 1 h long and consisted of between 3 and 10 students. They offered an opportunity for students to provide less-structured feedback about the design experience and also to discuss their opinions with other students in the class, which occasionally led to students disagreeing about their preferences in the design activity.
Data Analysis
After all of the students had completed the design activities and related assessments, the data were collected, organized, and analyzed. These data consisted of responses to multiple-choice questions, responses to open-ended questions, comments made during focus-group sessions, and the actual design documents generated from the activity. When analyzing these collected data, it was of interest to quantify the students’ performances during the design activity. This analysis was performed by examining the design documentation submitted by the students to identify specific data, such as the number of design iterations and building materials that were considered during the activity. In the case of ecoCampus, students took screen captures of their designs, and these images were compared to the paper-based activity formats.
In addition to analyzing the quantifiable data that were obtained during the various design activity implementations, responses to open-ended and opinion-based questions were also examined to identify trends in more qualitative data. This included analysis of responses related to perceptions about enjoyment and levels of interest that the activity facilitated in students related to sustainability and building design. Additionally, the responses to open-ended questions were also analyzed to help illustrate student thought processes that could not be determined from analyzing the design documents alone.
Results
As discussed in the Methodology section, this work consisted of three different sustainable design treatment activities: an open-ended, paper-based version with no direction on how to approach the design task provided; a paper-based version that approximated the computerized ecoCampus format; and finally, the developed ecoCampus application. During the research, there were 65 students enrolled in the first-year AE seminar course who completed the open-ended, paper-based activity in the fall 2011 semester. In the spring 2012 semester, 23 students enrolled in the first-year AE seminar course completed the paper-based ecoCampus approximation activity. In the fall 2012 semester, 47 students enrolled in the first-year AE course completed the activity with the first version of the computerized ecoCampus application. Finally, in the spring 2013 semester, students from three different courses participated in the research using the second version of ecoCampus. This last implementation included 34 students from the AE seminar course, 27 students from a third-year CE course, and 47 students from a fourth-year ARCH course.
By the nature of using three different disciplines’ courses for students in different academic years, the students were of various ages and also had varied levels of prior discipline-specific education. One important factor to note in choosing these courses, however, is that in each of the disciplines, these selected courses offered the first formal education on sustainable engineering content in each curriculum. It is also important to note that although this research took place over several semesters, none of the students who participated in the work completed multiple versions of this design activity.
Student Perception of Activity
In this research, the students participated in the design activity one time. When assessing their perception of the activity and performance during the activity, this prevented participants from being influenced by a prior, similar exercise in a different format. This made it difficult to identify key differences in their perceptions of the different formats of activities. For example, one of the assessment questions that this research explored was the extent to which students enjoyed this type of design activity. It was observed that the students who completed the computerized ecoCampus version of the activity enjoyed the activity very much, with between 79 and 96% of participants rating it as actively enjoyable. For the students who completed the paper-based versions of this design activity, 76 and 84% also rated it as actively enjoyable. This did not illustrate a substantial positive shift from the computerized ecoCampus version. Similar results were also observed when the students were asked about the level of interest in sustainability and the building design process that was generated from this design activity. The results obtained for each group are listed in Table 1.
| Data collected | Activity format | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open-ended, paper-based format (65 students) | Paper-based, ecoCampus approximation (23 students) | First version of ecoCampus (47 AE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (34 AE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (27 CE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (47 ARCH students) | |
| Enjoyment of activity (%) | 84 | 76 | 85 | 82 | 96 | 79 |
| Increased interest in building design (%) | 80 | 80 | 70 | 82 | 89 | 51 |
| Increased interest in sustainability (%) | 69 | 55 | 63 | 79 | 85 | 53 |
| Did not have enough time to complete the activity (%) | 43 | 43 | 2 | 9 | 11 | 9 |
In addition to examining how students felt about completing this activity from an enjoyment and interest point of view, questions were also included on the postactivity assessments to determine how students felt about the amount of time allowed to complete the design activities. Both of the paper-based versions of this activity illustrated that a substantial portion (more than 40%) of the students did not feel that they had adequate time to complete the design. The computerized ecoCampus versions of the activity had fewer students reporting an inadequate amount of time to complete the design, with less than 12% reporting inadequate time in all cases. This finding was also reinforced during focus-group sessions. In focus-group sessions with students completing the paper-based versions of the activity, nearly unanimous feedback was received that there was not enough time to complete the design. During focus-group sessions with students completing the ecoCampus version of the activity, feedback on the time allotted was more split, with several students saying they had enough time, but others suggesting that they would have wanted additional time.
It was also noteworthy that with the second version of ecoCampus, there tended to be more students indicating that they did not feel that they had enough time to complete the design activity compared with those using the first version. Specific assessments were not included to identify the reason why the second version of ecoCampus caused more students to indicate that they did not have enough time compared with the first version. It is possible that the added constructability critic provided additional design feedback that served as an additional challenge that made it more difficult for students to satisfy this critic within the class time.
Design Generation
In addition to measuring the students’ perceptions to determine how the activity was received, the submitted designs were also analyzed to identify typical student design behaviors. Prior work has identified design fixation as a common behavior in which people blindly adhere to a set of ideas that inhibit creativity and innovation (Jansson and Smith 1991). Design fixation can be a difficult behavior to mitigate because it can occur without designers realizing that it is affecting their process (Linsey et al. 2010). For the self-directed design task given in this research, the submitted designs were analyzed to determine how well students were able to break this tendency and consider a variety of design options over simply fixating on their first design instinct. The designs submitted by the students were analyzed to determine how many designs students created during their work and also how many materials were considered in their building redesign choices. The results are shown in Table 2.
| Data collected | Activity format | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open-ended, paper-based format (65 students) | Paper-based, ecoCampus approximation (23 students) | First version of ecoCampus (47 AE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (34 AE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (27 CE students) | Second version of ecoCampus (47 ARCH students) | |
| Completed multiple design iterations (%) | 17 | 30 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Average number of design iterations considered | 1.3 | 1.5 | 9.3 | 8.3 | 11 | 9.5 |
| Average number of materials considered | 3.6 | 3.7 | 9.3 | 9.6 | 10.3 | 11.0 |
Two-sample t-tests were used to check for statistically significant differences in the numbers of materials and design concepts that students considered during the implementations using ecoCampus and paper-based activities. In all cases, students who used either version of ecoCampus in any of the disciplines examined considered significantly more design concepts and materials than the students completing paper-based activities (P < 0.001). Additionally, every student who used ecoCampus completed their design work through the creation of multiple design iterations. In both of the paper-based treatment groups, the majority of students completed the activity through the creation of only one design concept.
Design Assessment
After quantifying the number of designs that were considered by the students, it was of interest to determine if the additional ecoCampus designs generated indicated additional design consideration or were merely a result of the students experimenting with the software. For the students who used ecoCampus, the simulation game scores that were obtained during the design process were recorded. Students’ first, last, high, and low scores were documented, as well as the corresponding design iteration on which each of those scores were obtained.
It was observed that students generally did not obtain their highest score on their first design iteration. Furthermore, they tended to record their highest score on a later design iteration than the iteration on which they scored their lowest score. When these observations are considered together, they indicate that students generally did not create their highest performing design on their first design iteration and that their best design concepts tended to be created after first creating other, typically lower performing concepts. This suggests that the students were generally able to use ecoCampus to analyze and improve their designs through additional iterations.
The performance of the designs generated in the paper-based formats was not quantified through a simulation game as in ecoCampus. Therefore, the students who completed these activities were not able to receive automated feedback on their designs. This lack of automated feedback in the paper-based versions of the activity may have also played a role in limiting their motivation to create additional design concepts during the activity. Therefore, the observation that students who completed one of the paper-based design formats generally exhibited design fixation was not surprising. Instead of using the tailored simulation game feedback related to their design process, they had to rely on their own design assessment abilities to influence their process. The more noteworthy finding related to the observed design processes between the paper-based and ecoCampus groups was that AE students in the same course and also students in other related disciplines’ courses were all able to actually use the feedback provided by ecoCampus to formulate alternative concepts. This suggests that ecoCampus was successful in helping students improve their ability to apply sustainable design concepts by actually designing.
Possibility for Misuse of Tool
Although ecoCampus tended to encourage several beneficial design behaviors, with a self-directed activity like this, some students also took the opportunity to use ecoCampus in ways that were not intended. After implementing the first version of ecoCampus in the fall 2012 semester, a few changes to the user interface were incorporated into the second version implemented in the spring 2013 semester. These modifications included a faster finger swipe–based design interface and an additional virtual constructability critic who generated feedback based on a design’s complexity (Ayer et al. 2014a). The intention of these additions was to make it easier to create design concepts and also to encourage students to consider constructability of their designs. With a game-based platform, several students took this as an opportunity to try to break the game to see what feedback would be generated if they were to develop novelty designs.
Fig. 3 shows one submitted design in which the student attempted to use nearly every material in the building wall design. After a student has created this type of design and proceeded to the simulation game user interface, the construction manager will generate a very negative comment about the design. As students recognized the ability to frustrate a particular design critic, they would be amused and share this with another student, who would, in turn, try to create other bad designs to frustrate other design critics. One student who used 30 different building materials in the design mentioned in the postactivity assessment that “It was really fun to wreak havoc on our building.”
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Another unintended use of the application was observed when students used the design interface to draw pictures in their designs. For example, several students attempted to create their wall designs by drawing their initials in glass into the brick walls. This type of design concept may not be a plausible design solution to the design activity in reality, but it was never anticipated during the development of ecoCampus. Therefore, in the simulation game interface, the performance factors that were considered and quantified were cost, daylight usage, thermal insulation, and constructability as a function of how many materials were incorporated in the design. When considering only these factors, a design such as the one shown in Fig. 4 would actually receive a very high rating because it does not use a great deal of expensive or thermally inefficient glazing, but it does use enough to let in some daylight, and with only two materials used, it requires only minimal interfaces between construction materials. Despite this loophole in the scoring mechanism, several students did recognize this as a problem. For example, one student commented that “Some aesthetic consideration should be taken into account. Our initials all worked best, but obviously this would be ridiculous in a real building.”
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Conclusions
This research explored the pedagogical value of using augmented reality and a simulation game to enhance building engineering and design education. To explore the value of these technologies, an educational game called ecoCampus was developed and compared to more traditional, paper-based design activities. Based on four semesters of implementing this same design activity with different formats, several noteworthy conclusions were made.
Student Perception
When examining the results of how the students perceived this educational activity, it could not be concluded that ecoCampus offered a better way to get students interested in building design and sustainability compared to the paper-based approaches. Instead, it was observed that both the ecoCampus and paper-based activities engaged students with the course content and obtained similar levels of increased interest from the students. This finding may be a testament to students simply enjoying the chance to learn out of the classroom environment and also to learn by doing. One important caveat to this finding is that the students completed only one version of the design activity. If students were asked to complete the design activity using both paper-based and ecoCampus formats and then asked to rate the level of interest that was generated through each format, the data could have indicated a preference that was not observed through the chosen research method.
Although students generally enjoyed all formats of the design activity, the students who used ecoCampus expressed less frustration with the time constraint associated with this design activity. This may have to do with the self-directed nature of the design activity involved in the class assignment. Although the paper-based formats had varied levels of structure for influencing students’ design processes, there is a certain inherent freedom that is offered to students when illustrating a design on paper. The workflow in ecoCampus provided a structure that limited some of the students’ design freedom. The fixed material library, predefined wall geometry pieces, and limited number of virtual project critics could all be described as elements that limit a user’s design freedom. These same limitations may have also helped the students to focus their design efforts and facilitate their design process within the class time. Furthermore, in conjunction with the speed for rapidly creating, visualizing, and assessing designs through ecoCampus, these limitations may have effectively lowered the effort required to consider more design options in a self-directed, time-constrained environment. Perhaps the most noteworthy finding from the data collected related to student perception is that ecoCampus tended to generate levels of enjoyment and interest as much as the more traditional approach, but also encouraged and enabled beneficial design behaviors that were not observed through the paper-based methods.
Student Performance
In addition to understanding how this activity was received by the students, it was also of interest to examine the actual design behaviors of the students who participated in the work. From examining the submitted designs that the students generated, the data suggest that students were able to break the tendency toward design fixation through the development and consideration of multiple design concepts. This ability to break away from fixation had been observed in prior work that examined AE students using ecoCampus (Ayer et al. 2013b), but this research also observed this same trend with students in CE and ARCH curricula as well. Admittedly, some of the design concepts considered were novelty designs that were not realistic for an actual building design, but even the students who created these designs still took time to create other, more plausible designs, and there was still an opportunity for them to learn while developing the novelty concepts.
In addition to considering more design concepts during this activity with the use of ecoCampus, students who used the application also considered more possible building materials in their designs during their work. This supports the conclusion that ecoCampus helped to break the tendency toward design fixation. This also suggests that the limitations included in the structure of ecoCampus (i.e., the predefined wall geometry grid and predefined material choices) actually helped students expand their thinking in the building design process. This may be due to the fact that the students who completed the paper-based versions of the design activity were all in the very early stages of their academic careers. At that early stage, they may not yet be familiar with building design concepts, alternative possible building materials, or additional design considerations. Therefore, although ecoCampus offered a limited number of choices, the number offered was still greater than what would have been considered by students otherwise.
Finally, in addition to the conclusions that ecoCampus helped students break the tendency toward design fixation, the results obtained also suggest that students were able to improve their ecoCampus performance scores through additional design iterations. Although this scoring mechanism does not indicate improved learning on its own, the observation that students were able to increase their scores through iterations suggests that they were able to use the simulation game feedback to influence future designs. This finding aligns with situated learning theory and suggests that students were generally able to learn how to change their design strategies to improve their performance through additional design iterations. Additionally, it also suggests that ecoCampus was successful in removing some of the hurdles to designing for sustainability while considering other typical performance factors as well.
Future Work
There were some limitations in the findings obtained in this pedagogical research. This research identified benefits and challenges of the computerized ecoCampus application compared to similar paper-based approaches. ecoCampus uses both augmented reality and simulation game technology in its workflow. Therefore, the two technologies were not assessed independently. This provides an opportunity for future work to explore the benefits of ecoCampus without the aid of augmented reality for visualization or without the simulation game for assisting users in assessing design concepts.
Additionally, the ecoCampus simulation game did not reward or penalize students’ designs based on aesthetics. Aesthetic consideration has an element of subjectivity to it, and although there may be some design strategies that most designers would agree are either aesthetically pleasing or displeasing, it is very difficult to automatically quantify. Therefore, in this activity, students were asked verbally and in the assignment description to consider the aesthetic appeal of their designs on their own. Without a quantifiable aesthetic score, it is difficult to conclude whether or not the students who used ecoCampus did better, worse, or the same with respect to aesthetic consideration in their design concepts compared to the paper-based approaches. It would be possible to assess aesthetics of the students’ designs by a panel of judges after the activities are submitted, but this would effectively strip the aesthetic feedback from immediately being displayed in the simulation component of the game. Future developments to ecoCampus could incorporate an aesthetic component into the design experience. If it is not possible to include immediate feedback, it may be possible to have students submit screen-captured images of what they believe to be their best designs to an online source and have ARCH professors or professionals evaluate the designs from an aesthetic point of view to provide feedback within the design session.
Despite the limitations of ecoCampus, it was shown to be a valuable tool for getting students to learn about sustainability and design concepts in an interactive and fun way. Further development of the system will seek to extend the breadth of the sustainable topics covered. Additional implementations and analysis of this type of learning method may also be able to help provide an understanding of what other human factors may affect users’ behaviors and perceptions about this type of learning activity, such as gender, personality traits, or others. In striving to understand the effect of these types of demographic variables, further developments will also target additional user groups to understand how this type of learning approach might be able to engage the general public with sustainability and design concepts to increase interest and awareness of these fields.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Raymond A. Bowers Program for Excellence in Design and Construction at Pennsylvania State University for its financial support of this research project and all of the students enrolled in this course who participated in this research effort.
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Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 1 • March 2016
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This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Received: Feb 5, 2015
Accepted: Aug 31, 2015
Published online: Jan 5, 2016
Published in print: Mar 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Jun 5, 2016
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